Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management

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Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management KATIE Z. GACH, ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder JED R. BRUBAKER, University of Colorado Boulder 2 In the landscape of online social networking sites, many platforms are reaching a scale and longevity that require designers to address the postmortem data interactions that follow people’s deaths. To evaluate the experiences and challenges people face when caring for memorialized profiles, we conducted 28 qualitative interviews with people serving as legacy contacts for memorialized Facebook accounts. We report on who legacy contacts are and their practices and their expectations, and find that people were chosen to be a legacy contact for one major reason: trust. In our analysis, we find disconnects between how people understand trust in the context of interpersonal relationships and how trust is technically implemented. We conclude by discussing the persistent challenges of representing the ambiguity of interpersonal trust in impersonal, computational systems. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social com- puting; Social networks; Social networking sites; Additional Key Words and Phrases: Post-mortem profile, Facebook, Legacy Contact, digital legacy, impersonal trust, user death, proxy ACM Reference format: Katie Z. Gach and Jed R. Brubaker. 2020. Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management. ACM Trans. Soc. Comput. 3, 1, Article 2 (February 2020), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3365525 1 INTRODUCTION Social computing systems represent and mediate our identities and relationships. If and when these systems misrepresent key elements of these, there are personal and social consequences. Entire identities can be misrepresented or outright denied [20], and accidental disclosures can threaten the very relationships that social platforms are built to facilitate [16]. Designing systems that ap- propriately represent our social lives is complex in the best of circumstances, but the consequences of misrepresentation can be particularly severe in the context of grief. In many cases, the social media content we create while we are alive persists after we have died. While extensive literature has documented the benefits of social media when memorializing the dead [13, 27, 39], postmortem data can present challenges as social media platforms continue to weave this content into people’s daily lives [10]. The bereaved may even encounter photos of their lost loved ones as a result of algorithmically curated content [32]. In a shift from the more Authors’ addresses: K. Z. Gach, ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Information Science, ENVD 201, 1060 18th St., Boulder, CO, 80309; email: [email protected]; J. R. Brubaker, University of Col- orado Boulder, Department of Information Science, ENVD 201, 1060 18th St., Boulder, CO, 80309; email: jed.brubaker@ colorado.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) mustbe honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2469-7818/2020/02-ART2 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3365525 ACM Transactions on Social Computing, Vol. 3, No. 1, Article 2. Publication date: February 2020. 2:2 K. Z. Gach and J. R. Brubaker private grief of the past century [41], families now wrestle with a lack of established etiquette when using social media to notify others of a death [40], let alone how to handle the persistent social media presence that the deceased themselves created [11]. As new systems are developed to enable people to care for postmortem profiles (e.g.,8 [ ]), those who care for these profiles do so in uncharted digital territory and alongside other important postmortem tasks like funeral planning [9]. In this article, we report on the experiences of those “stewarding” postmortem profiles on Face- book. As a framework, stewardship focuses on the relationships and responsibilities that accom- pany the management of postmortem data and stands in contrast with other approaches that focus on ownership [9]. Stewardship has proven useful for postmortem data management and most no- tably was the key framework in the design and implementation of Legacy Contact at Facebook [8]. Legacy Contact allows Facebook users to appoint another person to manage certain aspects of their profile upon their death. While Brubaker et al.[9] identified the relationships and re- sponsibilities that were formative to the design of Legacy Contact, their research was based on hypothetical designs. Similarly, the scholarship on Legacy Contact to date has focused on design rationale rather than extensive evaluation [8]. In the absence of a deployed system, this work has been limited by the inability to evaluate these systems with people’s actual lived experiences. We are now addressing this gap. The experiences of active legacy contacts speak to the specific chal- lenges of managing postmortem profiles, while also reflecting known difficulties that people face when handling the digital affairs of their deceased loved ones. We report on an analysis of 28 in-depth interviews with people acting as legacy contacts for the memorialized Facebook profile of a loved one. We describe their experiences, with a focus onthe responsibilities and challenges of managing postmortem profiles. While Facebook’s Legacy Con- tact feature is often helpful to those stewarding profiles, they still experience difficulties. We found that legacy contacts’ priorities—and frustrations—stem from their views of trust, particularly when the responsibilities with which they felt entrusted were limited by the functionality of the system. Building on this finding, we examine trust in two ways: its implementation in existing post- mortem data management systems and its role in emerging digital grief practices. We pose ques- tions about how interpersonal trust is operationalized within data systems and about the signifi- cant points of tension and breakdown when these systems fail people. We conclude that the current difficulties in postmortem data management are due to a discon- nect between how systems technically implement trust and people’s expectations that are based on an open-ended form of trust within their relationships. In the context of postmortem data and digital memorials, we argue that trust is the assignment of managing ambiguity to an individual who is perceived to be capable of balancing the values of the deceased with the needs of the deceased’s social network. We offer this definition to guide designers of postmortem data management sys- tems in considering the social significance of stewarding a digital identity. Finally, we consider how current affordances of social computing systems may be unsuited for the needs of digital heirs. 2 RELATED WORK Our study builds on previous work that approaches postmortem data management as a form of “stewardship.” As Brubaker et al. describe, “stewardship focuses upon carrying out responsibilities entrusted to the steward” [9, p. 4158] (emphasis added). Brubaker et al. situate trust as essential to stewardship yet do not provide an explicit definition. In our study, we found that both the designs around stewardship and our participants discuss responsibilities in terms of “trust,” but these definitions of trust were almost always implicit. Our current analysis highlights the rolethat trust, in its multiple forms, plays in the work of stewarding a postmortem profile and elaborates on the nature of trust within the context of stewardship. ACM Transactions on Social Computing, Vol. 3, No. 1, Article 2. Publication date: February 2020. Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management 2:3 Fig. 1. Interpersonal trust involves delegation to Fig. 2. Interpersonal trust can be maintained and reliance on another person. Continuous com- via ICTs when they support vulnerability, open- munication ensures trust by reducing uncertainty endedness, and real-time interaction. about others’ behavior. Fig. 3. Reputation measurements, identity veri- Fig. 4. Impersonal trust describes relying on a sys- fication, and visual indicators are used to com- tem to act as expected, such as expecting that an municate trust in mediated interactions. email sent arrives to the intended recipient. To ground our analysis, we first address scholarly definitions of and problems regarding trustin social and computer sciences. We then connect this scholarship to postmortem data management and the design of related systems, as those technologies and techniques are what people must be entrusted with after a death. 2.1 Understanding and Implementing Trust While there is an enormous body of work regarding trust across many disciplines, social computing scholars most often address trust in terms of interpersonal trust and impersonal trust. Interpersonal trust is concerned with delegation to and reliability of another person (e.g., “if I ask something of this person, will they follow through?”), while impersonal trust focuses on the reliability
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